Chris was a client of mine who was in deep, deep trouble. I was brilliant, as usual. Following a period of intense stress for us both, Chris escaped with his business and fortune intact. He paid me handsomely, and without question. Seeing how appreciative he was of my efforts, I took the opportunity to ask him why he never sent me his easy stuff to do. I appreciated the challenging files, but being the greedy lawyer that I was, I also wanted his routine work to keep my juniors and clerks busy billing hours.
Chris replied by explaining his taxicab theory to me. He told me that, for routine matters, he “had a guy named Bob” who was a competent lawyer and charged significantly less than I did. Bob was great at incorporating companies, drafting contracts, and closing simple deals. Chris called Bob a “taxicab” because all he had to do was tell Bob where he wanted to go, and Bob would get him there. But only if the route was clear.
When the path to his goal was not obvious, and Bob told him that, “you can’t get there from here,” Chris called me. Chris knew that I would take an expansive look, understand where we stood, where the roadblocks were, look beyond the conventional routes, and develop a strategy to get him as close to his destination as possible, all without getting him sued or thrown in jail. He called me when his attitude was, like the fictional President of the United States in the film The American President, “we have serious problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them.”
I don’t know whether artificial intelligence is going to be a serious person by 2036, but sitting here in 2026, it seems to me that it is more like Bob’s taxi service. AI may take you where you want to go if you know where that is, and there are established routes to get there, but if you need a serious problem solver, you still need to hire a human.
Lawyers need to take a hard look at their skill set. Do they know their area of specialty cold? Do they have a working knowledge of adjacent areas of law, and how those interact with their own area of expertise? Do they have common sense? Do they have business sense? Are they empathic? Can they be strategic? Creative? Practical? Do clients trust them?
Lawyers who can answer these questions in the affirmative have nothing to fear from AI, at least not yet. They are not about to be replaced any time soon. Those who do not want to live in fear of being replaced by AI have to work on improving their skills, before AI makes the legal taxi business obsolete.
See what Appara has to say about innovation in legal practice here: https://bit.ly/3PbNzmR